Mandriva 2006 Power Pack Installation Freezes
 

I booted the Mandriva 2006 Power Pack installation DVD, chose my language and security settings. At the partition screen, I set a 10GB partition of type "ext2" and a 3GB partition of type "swap" (I've got 1.5GB of physical RAM). The screen after, I check what I want to install but EVERY time I tried, no wonder what components I was choosing, the installation froze, pretty randomly, usually around 10-11% or 18%. I installed using the detailed view and can tell you that it at least froze two times on the "Tex" component. This is my first Linux installation ever and I find it pretty disappointing that it just freezes every time. That's why I would like your help to help me change my mind about Linux ;)

Thank you in advance!

Some details:
CPU: Athlon XP 2500+
RAM 3x512mb
HDDs: 1x80gb IDE (Windows)
2x250gb SATA (one storage, the other one splitted in 4, 1x142GB NTFS, 1x75GB NTFS, 1x10GB linux native (ext2) and 1x3GB linux swap)

welcome to LQ

use ext3 instead of ext2.
with such a large ram, you might get away with only 2gb swap

weird. Standard thing to do is to use kernel boot parameters when installing in this situation it may not help bu still try (press F1 or F2 at the very start)
acpi=off noapic nolapic

check you have no bad ram, no bad cluster on HD as well

Will ask mod to move your thread for better exposure

Did you order the DVD or did you burn it by yourself? In the latter case you should check your download and burn too.

Thank you Emmanuel, I will try what you said.

dexter11, I burned it, should I try to burn it again at a lower speed? Can it be the cause of my problems?

lower speed, sometimes different media, some drive do not like DVD-RW,
so be sure to use a DVD-R
You can check the checksum of the iso against the checksum advertised by wherever the dowload was from.
In restrospect, a bad burn look like waht your problem is

One of them made it work! Thank you very much :P (What were those command args doing anyways?)

But now, when I boot up, I see the following choices:

I chose linux, it then started to load a lot of components with all green [ OK ] before falling back to a black text-based login screen. I entered my username and my password and I had now a line similar to myuser@localhot`|]$ and nothing else. What do I need to do to boot up my system? I tried typing "startx" but my two screens went in power-save mode, I heard a sound and I couldn't do anything else since I was seeing nothing...

Thank you

try
acpi=off noapic nolapic video=vesa

It sounds like you have a video card (which one?) configuration issue
Once it is booted up fine start a terminal, type su then passpword
to become root, then drakx11 to try to set the right resolution and driver.
Next time you boot you should not need video=vesa

To learn about linux, go to LQ bookmark ans search for newbie, and also for rute
See as well http://www.mandriva.com/en/community.../documentation
command line and starter (It will be installed by the distro)

Later on visit http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/
(see the sticky in the mandriva forum about tar.gz)

PS: while you are at it
you can type dmesg and look for clue of what went wrong
as root track hints by doing also
less /var/log/Xorg.0.log
or
less /var/log/xorg.0.log

play with the tab key
ls will list files
man ls will give you the manual

http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/
Newbie's Top Ten Commands:
http://www.cmm.uklinux.net/steve/ntt.html

I'm posting from my Linux installation now :p I tried something before going to bed (which worked) but I did not had time to post it here. Once in console mode, I ran XFdrake and changed the "Radeon" it had selected to "All In Wonder" which is what I really have (AIW 9600XT) and it seems to have worked :) I'm wondering wether I should undo my changes and do what you said above or if all is ok now.

Only issue I'm having right now is that I cannot get my second monitor to work in a dual screen setup, my monitors are currently mirrored instead. I went to the display page and there is a greyed out drop-down list "Screen 1", cannot click it and get to Screen 2 :( I would like your help with that. Thank you :)

Not broken, do not fix it.
Seriously it is fine. You just learned another way how to do it.

Now then, if I knew I would not help you with that ;)
You need to do some homewrok first and tell people what you tried
You need to look at
man xorg.conf
google for xinemara (I think that is the name)
Then people might be able to help (if you give as much details as possible
about hardware etc.)

mathieumg , time to go back to some homework :D
Maybe somebody charitable will help, but personally I think they should wait or just give you clues / hints

PS: I say that because you are looking into less newbie territory,
maybe a bit too soon, I mean if the GUI does not let you do it,
there are other things to learn about linux to help you achieving your goal. My 2cents

The search engine for this site is really great,

I search for "dual screen setup"

and "xinerama"


See how you go.

As for the lilo setup, each windows partition that has been set at some stage to be bootable

Is listed.

Go to configure my hardware, and then click on the boot manager icon.

There you will be presented with the main boot, just leave that alone and click next.

There you'll be presented with the other items in the boot menu.

Here is where you can remove unwanted items. You can have a look with the modify button to

chech what they are attached to, windows is usually hda or hda1. But not always.

The other windows partitions can safely be deleted from the list.

Be careful here because you can stuff it up very easily.

The items will only be deleted from the list, the partitions will remain and you may be

able to access them through the file manager in the /mnt directory.

Lots of windows speak here, but I'm trying to keep it simple.

Cheers.

Too Little Too Late
 

I had the exact same problem! I got the Powerpack 2K6, and installed it on an old P3 Gateway, and it crashed at random too... My crashes were at copying the files, installation of bootloader, and post-install config (usually when I click on the Video, and Network sections) I didn't bother downloading another copy because I didn't have the time for it (took me a about 6 hours to get it from Torrents).

Once installed, it did not go to desktop, like mathieumg experienced. If I had read Emmanuel_uk's post earlier, I would not have resorted to SuSE 10.1. I've tested Mandriva's previous versions - Mandrake 10 and older - and 60% of the time, KDE won't start because of the video issue. I'll give it another shot, and hopefully it works...

Does wireless work now mathieumg? I have a Netgear WG311 that already works with Windows ME (I know, I know, time to upgrade... or switch ;)

Hi! Bluestreak, I'm afraid I can't help you on that one as I do not own any wireless material in any of my home computers, may it be a wireless network card or even a wireless router. (We're all wired :)) And yeah, I consider any OS better than ME, perhaps even Win 3.1 or DOS :p

Card: Netgear WG311 v2 (TI ACX 111#*Chipset)
see http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/m...index.php/List
for more info, should work